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Pessimistic Themes in West’s Necrophobic Aesthetic

: Moving Beyond Subjects ofPerfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence.(Forthcoming The Pluralist)

by Dr. Tommy J. Curry

This intersectional allusion to the bourgeois Black woman, her indemnification against all critique, has long been the unquestionable norm operating within the political assertions of Black feminism and the allegedly conceptual pluralization had in claiming intersectionality as a method. Carole Boyce Davies describes this tendency as condification; “a project perhaps, a behavioral process which marks the rise of a certain neo-colonial elite in the U.S. imperial context, operating for the benefit of the dominant state and its rulers” (14). Davies argues that “Condification marks the limit …but can also be seen as the ultimate manifestation of a domestic black and/or feminist bourgeois discourse” (14), and presents a concrete crisis for Black feminist calls for social, economic, and political equality, since there is no accountability to the buttressing up of empire and inequality in their march towards capitalist freedom. Davies is not alone in this analysis of Black feminism; Elaine Brown has gone as far as to say: “feminism,” assuming this word, which I don’t assume (let’s just call it that for now, women’s liberation, the liberation of all human beings), is part of my agenda. If you take their analysis, as strict analysis, you can end up having a woman like Condoleezza Rice. So they are incorrect in their ideological commitment. Condoleezza Rice would be the ultimate Black feminist icon. So they’re wrong” (3). Power within the system is justified as gender progress, and rationalized as the necessary trajectory of political progress. There are no criteria for liberation, only the accumulation of representatives that are Black and female who command the recognition of systems previously blind to their existence. The now common practice of lifting the immaterial subject, the ideal abstraction of the (Black) feminist self, represented by the mere utterance of race, class, and gender, destroys our ability to truly understand the suffering of Black people. The Black man, the Black woman, and the Black child who survive in the bare conditions of wretchedness nurtured by anti-Blackness—the poverty, death, and violence of racial oppression—are never seen. They are spoken about as factors, but never considered to be the primary subjects motivating study. Intersectionality, its synonymy with the ideal bourgeois Black woman, is an errant axiom that denies Black study for the elevation of one (powerful, Black, female) identity taken to be the finality of all Black morality.”

Introduction

The release of Kanye West‘s Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his song entitled the ― New Slave ,‖ which introduced a pessimistic terminology deployed against the paradoxical condition that Black freedom from enslavement only recaptured Black people psychically in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His analysis,not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism, or Critical Race Theory‘s (racial)realist lens maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West‘s performance of ―New Slave,‖on Saturday NightLive was only amplified by the Not For Sale insignia projected behind him.

As a symbol ofindependence, disengagement; a resistance against commodification, West announced hisconfrontational posture towards the industry; a posture which ignited the Hip-Hop communityand academia alike over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite itsrhetorical flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic. Kanye West isa Black man torn at moments by his brilliance and at times by his banality. His work is not beinganalyzed in Hip-Hop Studies and philosophical aesthetics because it is not worthwhile;

— his analysis of anti-Black death, corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration is enough to warrant morethan one serious study of his art. West is not studied because he lacks sufficient correctness orexhibits minimalist thoughts about the world around him, rather West is not studied because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking.The New Slave implicates all arenas of knowledge and political production hailing from theacademy, and while his life and public proclamations are at tension with some of his work, itnonetheless necessities serious study, rather than sophistry and condemnation. This article is anattempt to draw out some of the themes concerning anti-

Black racism in West‘s ―New Slave and the double meaning this work has given that it was co-

authored with Che ―Rhymefest Smith.

It is my view that West‘s work establishes the continuity of enslavement beyond the artificial political and social changes that are attributed to racial progress and social equality.

Tommy J. Curry’s work spans across the various fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies. Though trained in American and Continental philosophical traditions, Curry’s primary research interests are in Critical Race Theory and Africana Philosophy. In Critical Race Theory, Curry looks at the work of Derrick Bell and his theory of racial realism as an antidote to the proliferating discourses of racial idealism that continue to uncritically embrace liberalism through the appropriation of European thinkers as the basis of racial reconciliation in the United States. In Africana philosophy, Curry’s work turns an eye towards the conceptual genealogy (intellectual history) of African American thought from 1800 to the present, with particular attention towards the scholars of the American Negro Academy and the Negro Society for Historical Research.

In Biomedical ethics, Curry is primarily interested government regulation, the ethical limits of government intervention in the practice of medicine, and democratic potentialities that arise from collaborative doctor-patient diagnoses and regenerative medicine like stem cells. Currently his research focuses on the linking the conceptualization of ethics found in the Belmont Report to Civil Rights and social justice paradigms.

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- James Baldwin
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